As Studio 360 writes:

This week, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev announced that Vladimir Putin would be United Russia’s candidate next year, all but assuring him the presidency — possibly until 2024. Many in Russia saw this coming, and the country’s artists have been pioneering new forms of risky, highly public dissent.

Anna Nemtsova, Moscow correspondent for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, has been following the growing movement of street artists. Voina (“War”), a collective from St. Petersburg, is responsible for some of the most daring art actions. “They declared a war,” Nemtsova tells Kurt Andersen, “to state corruption, injustice, and the political regime.”

It’s not high art. Voina’s actions (and the videos of them posted online) are designed only to mock and humiliate the Russian political class as humorously as possible, much like the illegal billboards of the collective Monolog. Last year Voina painted a 210-foot phallus on a drawbridge facing the Federal Security Bureau, the former KGB. Because of this and other actions (some of them truly Not Safe for Work), they remain underground to avoid arrest. But at the same time, the ministry of culture awarded Voina an art prize for their rude graffiti. “It’s a very interesting phenomenon we have in Russia,” Nemtsova says. “One hand is giving the prize, the other hand is punishing.”

Listen to the full piece here:

As each of the other Strategy 31 rallies that have been held since the series’ inception one year ago, Saturday’s event was unsanctioned by the Moscow city authorities – thus technically punishable by Russian federal law. As with past events, the mayor’s office denied sanction to rally organizers on the basis that another event was already planned for Triumfalnaya Square, where Strategy 31 is traditionally held. In the past, these events have included sports festivals, “Winter Festivities,” and rallies promoting blood drives by the pro-Kremlin youth movement Young Russia. This time, it was a three-day car show.

As oppositionists gathered on Triumfalnaya Square, the sound of skidding tires and roaring motors drowned out all other noise – at the very time of the rally, an improvised race track had been set up to hold a drifting competition. According to Gazeta.ru, no more than 50 people were watching the competition.

Given that Triumfalnaya Square is not large enough to hold a drifting competition, the neighboring roadway leading from Moscow’s Garden Ring to Tverskaya Ulitsa was blocked off to give the cars more room. Previously, oppositionists have been criticized by the authorities and their opponents specifically for blocking traffic.

In any case, as a result of the barriers, space to walk between Triumfalnaya Square and the bordering Tchaikovsky Concert Hall was so tight that police officers themselves had no space to move around. Therefore, notes Gazeta.ru, it was harder for them to detain rally participants.

Strategy-31 co-organizer Eduard Limonov, who has been arrested numerous times and spent 10 days in confinement for organizing an unsanctioned Strategy 31 rally, managed to avoid detention specifically because of the lack of space for the police to move. Surrounded by a ring of six personal guards, the National Bolshevik leader was able to stay at the rally for a full hour before quietly taking leave.

Other areas of the square were not as peaceful. Boris Nemtsov was among the approximately 100 detained (by official Moscow city police numbers, 35), and has reportedly been charged with insubordination towards a police officer. Opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov was detained after handcuffing himself to a metal gate. According to Kasparov.ru, police initially tried to detain Udaltsov by physically tearing him away from the gate: “They nearly broke my arm,” he said. After several minutes, police brought metal cutters to sever the handcuffs. Other activists, including some with the opposition art movement Voina, also handcuffed themselves to the gate and were similarly violently torn away by the police.

Overall, rally participants and media correspondents noted that the police acted typically violently. Detained activists, blogging over their cell phones in police buses, reported that even young girls were being violently beaten by the police. One Kasparov.ru correspondent witnessed a police colonel punching a female photographer in the back three times over. Upon detention, police reportedly tore off activists’ clothing if the number “31” was written on it.

As Gazeta.ru reports, the police charged with dealing with the squished mass of activists between Triumfalnaya Square and the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall at one point formed a human chain (made up largely of more full-bodied officers) and began squeezing the rally participants towards a nearby metro entrance. The force of this chain was so great that some police reportedly let out some of the female activists who were screaming in pain.

However, instead of pushing the crowd into the metro, the police ended up pushing the crowd toward the neighboring Theater of Satire. In result, the glass facade of the theater shattered, injuring a soldier and several other people. According to Moscow City Police spokesman Viktor Biryukov, the soldier was injured only after a female opposition activists pushed him. “In result, the soldier fell to the ground and was wounded in the face by the glass,” he said.

The last of the Strategy 31 participants dispersed around 8:30 pm. Many of them went to rally outside of the various police stations where detained activists were being held. At about this time, State Duma Deputy and Young Russia leader Maksim Mishchenko showed up in a black dress jacket and began to give a fiery speech about the “evil empire” that he believes the United States to be.

The Tagansky District Court in Moscow handed down its verdict in the high-profile case Monday morning, ordering exhibit curator Andrei Yerofeyev and former Andrei Sakharov Museum director Yury Samodurov to pay out the equivalents of $6500 and $4900 respectively. The two were sued by the ultra-right Russian Orthodox organization People’s Assembly for organizing the exhibit “Forbidden Art – 2006,” which included works that the group claimed were criminally offensive. State prosecutors requested a three-year jail sentence for each of the organizers.

According to the verdict, Yerofeyev and Samodurov are guilty of acting in a way that was “directed at the fomentation of hatred and enmity through the use of religious imagery.” The court called the plans for the exhibit “a deliberate crime” that the two men were able to consciously plan out due to their professional knowledge of art. The judgment cited testimony from People’s Assembly activists and other Russian Orthodox followers who spoke on behalf of the prosecution, claiming that the exhibit “foments hatred towards the Orthodox Church on the whole and Christianity in particular.” They also asserted that the works had no artistic value.

Notably, of the 134 witnesses for the prosecution, only three had actually visited the exhibit.

At the same time, the court declared that evidence given by specialists speaking for the defense was unscientific and refused to take it under consideration. Testimony from artists, art historians, critics, and journalists speaking for the defense was cited in the court decision only in small fragments. On the whole, the court claimed that testimonies for the defense didn’t hold water.

Both the exhibit organizers and People’s Assembly activists say they play to appeal the decision. The ruling elicited scathing disapproval from Orthodox activists, who stood outside Tagansky Court late into the evening on Monday shouting “disgrace!” A state prosecutor declined to comment on whether or not they were indeed planning to appeal.

Before the beginning of Monday’s session, members of the activist art group Voina released 3500 cockroaches into the halls of the courtroom in a sign of support for the defendants. Two activists were detained as a result.

This is not Yury Samodurov’s first conviction of inciting religious hatred for showing works of art. In March 2005, the then-director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center was convicted on these grounds as a result of organizing an exhibit entitled “Careful, Religion!” Then, as now, prosecutors asked for a three year prison term, but Samodurov was only faced to pay a fine of approximately $3225.

A photo essay of “Forbidden Art – 2006” is available in Russian by clicking here. The first set of five pictures explains how the exhibit was set up: Viewers enter a room with blank white walls, and as the art is hidden behind the walls, viewers must peek through small holes to view the works in fragmented form. As the Sakharov Museum’s website explains, the paintings are among those that were banned by various Moscow museums and galleries throughout the year 2006. “The goal is to monitor and discuss the character and tendency for institutional censorship in the cultural domain,” says the site. The exhibition was held from March 7 – 31, 2007.

The Telegraph also provides a contextually worthwhile perspective of the ruling: “Museum curators convicted over Mickey Mouse painting”